The Linear Tape Open (LTO) formats Generations 3 and 4 use error-correcting codes (ECC), which are based on a 2-dimensional product code. The C1-code is arranged along the rows of the 2-dimensional array. It is an even/odd interleaved Reed-Solomon (RS) code of length 240 giving rise to a row of length 480. The C2-code is arranged along the columns of the array. It is a RS-code of length 64 and dimension 54. The codewords are 2-dimensional arrays of size 64×480 and they are called subdata sets in the LTO standard. It is anticipated that future generation of drives will write on more than 16 tracks simultaneously. However, all current generations of LTO formats (Gen-1 to Gen-4) are based on the above C2 coding scheme which, together with its associated interleaving, cannot accommodate future tape-drive systems that will support heads with 16, 24, 32 or 48 (or other multiple of eight) transducers/sensors per head to read/write 16, 24, 32 or 48 (or other multiple of eight) concurrent tracks, respectively. Furthermore, it is expected that future generations of drives will use longer subdata sets having rows, which consists of 4-way codeword interleaves (CWI-4) of length 960 instead of the 2-way even/odd codeword interleaves (CWI-2), which are called codeword pairs of the LTO format (Gen-1 to Gen-4). In LTO Gen-1 to Gen-4, these CWI-2s are endowed with codeword pair headers and grouped into pairs to form codeword objects (CO). When a write failure occurs, entire COs are rewritten. If the same CO-rewrite strategy is applied to subdata set rows consisting of CWI-4s, there is a loss in efficiency because most often only one of the two CWI-4s per CO had a failure and the other CWI-4 would not need to be rewritten. Since CWI-4s are twice as long as CWI-2s, the loss in efficiency is about twice as large in the former case as in the latter.